A Short Guide to Giving a Short Speech

By David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine, and

executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association

Youve been assigned to give a short speech. Youve spent months or weeks or days warding off your anxiety by telling yourself, Its
just a short speech.
Today youre faced with actually writing the short speech, and youre forced to confront what you really knew all along:
The real difficulty in giving a speech has nothing to do with its length. If anything, giving a short speech leaves you more exposed than
giving a long one, in which you can meander from half baked notion to somewhat relevant anecdote to mildly amusing statistic, thereby
lulling the audience into a trance that allows them to tell themselves, This speaker sounds intelligent, and must have a strong point which
Im apparently missing.
A short speech offers you no such shelter.
Heres how to give a good one.

1. Do not overreach.
It is a short speech. It should be on a specific topic. If youre giving a short speech about the history of the Chevrolet Corvair, for instance,
do not be tempted by your own intellectual ambition, by the audiences expectations or by any other force to expand the topic to 20th
century transportation and its contribution to the decline of the family as the essential social unit.
Tell us about the Corvair. Tell us something we dont know. And tell us why you care so much about it, and why we should too.

2. Write the speech in a sentence, and expand it from there.

If you cant summarize the point of your speech in one sentence, how do you expect listeners to do so with their loved ones and friends?
Your listeners will be asked, if you are lucky, What was the speech about? They will not answer, The speech was about three things:
the global economy, climate change and the situation in the Middle East.
If your speech was about all that, your listener will confess to his questioner, I honestly dont remember what the speech was about. But
the speaker was really intelligent!
If you have a message that you want to spread, thats not what youre going for. This is what youre going for.
What was the speech about?

The speaker said if we dont shift from fossil fuel to alternatives by 2030, were all dead.
Get that line on the page first - the sentence you want your listeners to use to explain your speech to their half interested friends who
didnt attend it - and begin to build your speech from there.

3. Show the audience why they needed to see you in person.

Seven hundred years ago, a speech was an efficient way to communicate: Everybody gather round so I can tell you all at once.
Then came the Gutenberg Press. And then newspapers. And then radio. And then TV. And then Internet, and now social media.
If youre seriously going to ask people to stand there and be quiet - and stay off their phones to listen to one person talk even for a
short time, youd better not leave them wondering why you didnt just send them an email or put something up on YouTube. Youd better
connect with them, and youd better use your physicality to do it.
This doesnt require perfect elocution. Quite the opposite, actually.
It means you have to be deeply involved in the speech. Your voice should shake, your lips should quiver, your eyes should smile, your
hands should dance as you get across a message that means something to you that, for as long as youre delivering it and as far as
the audience is concerned, means everything to you.

4. Give your audience something meaningful to share with one another.

The deepest and eternal reason people still gather to see and hear a speech when they could just look the speaker up on YouTube is
that they want to see each other. They want to watch the speaker and simultaneously watch other people like them watching the speaker.
You know youre fulfilling your social purpose as a speechmaker not when the audience gazes at you with apparent rapt attention. People
learned to fake that in school before they were seven years old. No, you know your speech is making an impression when you see
members of the audience looking at one another in astonishment that says something like,
Is this person as interesting [or funny or courageous or honest or righteous or, yes its possible, stupid] to you as to me?
People go to speeches and eagerly listen to wedding toasts and eulogies because they want to feel bonded not only with a speaker
but with one another. To some small extent, your speech should transform its audience into an intellectual or spiritual community with two
things in common: you, and your message.

5. Put your speech to this test: Could this speech have been delivered by any other person to any other
audience at any other moment in history?
If the answer is yes to more than one of these questions, the audience will sense that what theyre eating came from a can.
Theyre attending your speech because its human spontaneity they want. The good news is, thats really all they want. And they want it
so badly that you theyre not demanding a new idea, or even a new perspective.
You dont have to say something new, you just have to say something personally true.
Thus, there are only two steps to writing a short speech - or any speech at all.
1. Whats personally true for you?
2. Prove it.
If you can do that as these givers of great short speeches did before you youll have done something good. If you cant dont give
the speech. (Youll have done something good, too.)